Debut Flash: 'Don't write about the ceiling fan' by Anya Rosensteel

It's cliché. It's the only thing you see as you lie in  bed—that and the window. You can write about the window, and the squirrel that chastises you every morning because you have the audacity to live on a second floor. But don't write about the ceiling fan and the shadows it creates in the afternoon. The squirrel breaks your pots. It also sees you naked. Do you remember Apocalypse Now? Blades churning hot stagnant air. Of course you do. It's the ceiling fan. You've tried posting flyers — "Stop feeding the squirrel!" — complete with an FAQ about how squirrels are trash beasts that ruin the ecosystem and your life. "Q: Did you know squirrels eat baby birds? A: Yes, they are monsters in fur suits." But you still find half-buried peanut shells. Peanuts that DO NOT GROW HERE. When people read about your ceiling fan they will only think of better ceiling fans, more poetic ceiling fans. Stick with the squirrel. That fucking squirrel.

 

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Anya Rosensteel is an artist living in Santa Monica, CA.

 

Debut Flash: 'No One Will Know Unless It Takes' by Jenna Martin-Trinka

Right before you turn forty-one, you will get your IUD removed, the second one you’ve had, and you will not tell your husband. Your hands will clutch the white paper lining of the exam table, you’ll scooch down to the edge, dangle your legs until you lock them into place in the sock-covered stirrups, your nurse practitioner, always so patient, will say, “feel my touch” and, “hear this click,” and with just the slightest pull, the copper T-shape will slide out and you will think of a crack forming in a dammed river, letting a trickle of water run through it. You will say, “Goodbye, old friend,” just like you did for the first one.

You will blame your four-year-old who talks to his imaginary sister, which should not have swayed you as your best friend will tell you who is an active member of the online group One and Done and On the Fence.

You will blame the framed photographs of you at thirty-six weeks pregnant, cradling your blossoming belly, your smile so full of purpose, images meant to ground you in your new home but that now unroot you.

But you will be the one to blame—addicted to the idea of fruitfulness, to the promise of This Is What You Are Doing Now. You will hop down from the table to measure your naked body for ripeness before getting dressed, then ride the elevator down to the ground floor like you are descending into a tide of possibility.

 

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Jenna Martin-Trinka writes creative nonfiction and flash fiction. She lives in the Appalachian region of Virginia with her husband, young son, and truck camper parked in the yard named Emmy Lou. Her day job is teaching Spanish as a public school teacher.

 

Debut Flash: 'Fortune Telling is a Union Job' by Gwendolyn Hanson

In April I leave my womb unguarded and ghost my gynecologist. I walk to the ATM, letting the worn plastic of an almost-expired debit card try to pull something out of a metal void. I catch myself trying to imbue feeling into a machine and remember I wasn’t always like this. 

When the sun begins to set I realize sentimentality has always failed me. I wander towards the psychic on the corner, passing by a bird’s nest resting in the clutch of a powerline. The palm reader tells me I need to moisturize. 

I tell her that for ten dollars I expect to learn something new, so she diagnoses me with primordial impatience. She promises me I have a holocene body buried in this new skin. I imagine what a meteor feels like to the dirt. She guarantees my memory is disingenuous. 

She keeps interrupting the heartwork to spray more rosewater onto the skin of her tanned chest. There is a fading tattoo of a mermaid in the clutch of her collarbone that reminds me of how it felt to swallow sand. 

She asks if I fake my orgasms, I confess every single one. She tells me to keep bleaching my hair, and says I’m getting close to what I want, that she can smell it through the echoing cologne of a jacket that isn’t mine.

 I request a better answer next time. I drop a crumpled bill into her silvery paw, her palm is the texture of a fried fish. I yawn and her crystal ball rolls onto the smoked out carpet. She turns into a mouse, chases after it beneath a gold-coin curtain.

I head home with an ache between my legs and a car crash burning out of my throat. 

 

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Gwendolyn Hanson is a fiction writer and poet currently getting her MFA in the former at the University of Maryland. She works at a grocery store and writes about the end of the world.

 

Debut Flash: 'Centaurus A' by Olivia Woodcox

His eyes haven’t moved once from the star. He’s laid up like a corpse, dropping empty beer cans carelessly in the pool. They float but don’t make ripples. LED lights warm the bottoms of our feet. The colors change smoothly like cutting through jello.  “They’re beaming me up.” 

 I’m in one of those plastic donuts that crush your knees to your chest so I have to push off the wall to reach the cooler. I grab myself an IPA. “You know where you’re going?” He doesn’t answer, so I assume not. I grab his raft to keep it from drifting off. When I put my head next to his we’re sharing the same sky. “...looks like Centaurus A.” 

“Is that a good one?” 

“Nah, man. Their sun’s a black hole.” I crack the can open and offer him a sip he doesn’t take. His clothes have mostly dried but there’s a puddle in the center of the raft trying to seep into the back of his t-shirt. “Shit’s gonna destroy itself. You seen any aliens yet?” He doesn’t respond so I splash him to make him move. “Well? C’mon man, what do they want with you?”

For a while he stays silent. His eyes get wide and wet and he makes a sort of choking sound. I take my hand off the raft and squeeze his shoulder. “They wanted to show me...” Snot trickles down his face. I see the constellations reflected back through him. Words are finite, useless things in space. The breadth of his silence tells me everything I needed to know. I climb off my donut and float on my back for a while, the chlorine in my ears muddying his sobs as my brother mourns a world lightyears away.

 

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Olivia Woodcox was born and raised in Indiana with a perpetual fear of alligators (who are not native to Indiana, which Olivia considers to be a win). When she's not writing, she works in a children's library scrambling to keep plastic objects out of kids' mouths.

 

Debut Flash: 'Unwanted Pitch' by Christian Todd

The great arthropod, slumber disrupted by a persistent surface sound, crawled up the tunnel. Pushing the semicircle door open, it looked down at the two scourges: salesmen.

“Hello, would you be interes-”

It ejected an acid at them: melting the bodies.

The invertebrate curled back inside and shut the door.

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Christian Todd is a writer of the strange and provocative. When he sits down to write, he ponders the images in his mind and picks out the most unique of the bunch. Nothing is more exciting to him than plotting and executing an idea.

Debut Flash: 'Tagalong' by L.V. Leonhard

I press the doorbell and pray that no one answers. My heart pounds a strangled staccato, a knot clogs my throat. I count to three. The door is still closed. I thrill; I can leave. Just as I turn away, the door clicks open. A blinding white fear constricts around me as I realize that it’s too late now, I can’t get away. I want to run. She stands in the doorway, looks down at me. Can I help you, she asks. I try to answer but my voice is a paralyzed whisper. The words come out in a feeble croak, Would you like to buy some cookies? I hold the order form toward her, which has become progressively more mangled by my sweaty grip as I have proceeded from house to house in my ungainly brown felt beanie. The same at each one: I pray that no one is home, or I knock on the door so lightly that I know no one will hear. I am supposed to sell these thin wafers of minty chocolate, these treacly coconut dusted caramel rings. I am supposed to, I don’t want to, I haven’t been able to, I must, I can’t. The afternoon has passed and my order form is still blank. A dog pants behind her. She smiles politely and shakes her head. She closes the door and I run back down to the sidewalk, triumphant. I have escaped. I will not earn a badge for this. 

 

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L.V. Leonhard is a writer who lives in Baltimore, Maryland. 

 

Debut Flash: 'Under the Bark' by EB Converse

Some days, when I am feeling more invisible than others, I look at that tree outside and watch the snail that crawls as slowly as I do. Alone, I slow my reflexes to nothing and feel invisible, like an ant or a tree beetle, disappearing into the nothingness of bark and the inner life. I am invisible, I am not heard, even when I am screaming. I am just a snail, moving slowly along the curling bark, trudging above or behind the ants and other crawling things. Sometimes a bear climbs up and rests in the branches above me, or a raven settles on the branch below with fat in its beak. Then I just settle in, deep in the furrows of curling bark, without a voice, without light — under the bark, just waiting, and waiting.

When this spiral unfolds into the daylight again, I wonder where my life went in this darkness. The spiral I exist in, going in and coming out eternally, from darkness to light and from light back to darkness — as spirals of stars that come and go, as sounds of the birds that ebb and flow, as creatures that grow and live and die, over and over, in these deep dark layers of wood and bark where I travel so slowly, unheard, unseen.

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EB Converse writes: flash fiction, novels, and art journalism. She is also a painter.

 

Debut Flash: 'Cityshell Resonance' by Natalie Mather

Bring these headphone shells to your ears and listen closely to wind-whipped flags, crashing feet, city bells clanging while new tides of trains rise to concrete piers. 

Allow sunlight to project on your closed eyelids. Phantom crowd-waves rock you back and forth, in a circular motion as you tread your sneaks to stay afloat, air-conditioned shores in sight. 

Coral reef shop windows display schools of humans darting in and out with paper-bag fins on either side of them. Pastel scales welcome more tropical temperatures, but their most precious plastic scale remains purse-protected and pin-code secure. Lines await them, sale and coupon bait ready for the perfect swipe between register gills or hook by chip reader. Some are biting. Others glide lazily past.

This is the resort of sand-apartments and rebars. Stroll down the paved boardwalk along asphalt rivers were cars float down. Claim a restaurant umbrella to beachwood-bum it out. 

Find the buoy’s peace as you get lost in an ocean of people.

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Natalie Mather is an undergrad from Cedar Hills, Utah, studying Literary Studies and Creative Writing at UVU. She is currently writing prose poetry and flash fiction. This fall, she will leave for the Study Abroad Program at the BYU London Centre to study linguistics, art history, and gathering spaces.

 

Debut Flash: 'gnome' by Emily Garland

there’s a gnome here. i tell you because on your profile you noted you liked gnomes and gardens but not butterflies. you said they’re too pretty, and you’re more like a moth. but you did not specify which moth and I’m curious if you feel more barberry carpet or frosted orange, or perhaps another of a thousand I won’t list, like my reasons for liking your profile. but if perhaps you are more maiden’s blush than wild lichen button or monochromatic orchard ermine, and too shy to respond, please know i’m more like a moth too, but not in the way a moth is in love with arson, but in that i feel in need of dusting.  as if someone should tend my miniscule wings like a bonsai garden. anyway, there is a gnome for sale, with a blue hat like the one in your profile, and I plan to sit here until closing, knowing even if you don’t respond, i will buy the gnome and come away with something. 

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Emily Garland is a queer, Canadian writer who keeps tricking herself into thinking she has the attention span to write novels. She is forever looking for the next best chocolate chip cookie.

 

Debut Flash: 'Photo Day' by Joy DeSomber

The airbrushed photos that a staff member slides across the table for me to preview look exactly the way I remember that day. 

The photo studio, thick with an inch of dust, hadn’t made me second-guess driving there, using gas money we didn’t have. My two year old son and infant daughter weren’t horrified by the beleaguered woman behind the camera, who vigorously shook a stuffed parrot, gripping it by the neck whilst screeching and lurching across a rugged voice box, “Look at the birdie, look at the birdie,” beads splattering in a zigzag pattern from a split in the seam on one side of its head that continued tearing.

Afterward, a carousel in the center of the mall wasn’t eerily still until I dropped in a coin. I wasn’t concerned that my children’s squeals and the clunky music echoed off the two-story structure, despite it being a Saturday afternoon in 1999. 

When I said, “Kids, it’s time to pick up Daddy,” I hadn’t poured more excitement into my voice than the so-called photographer. 

We didn’t wait in front of my husband’s friend’s apartment for over an hour. During our time in the parking lot, their dad didn’t stumble to the minivan, offering a variety of excuses for his unwillingness to leave, and his words didn’t slur more with each trip. I wasn’t at all worried that the evening would unravel, everything would be my fault, and I’d be expected to return to pick him up long after I’d tucked our children into bed. 

Look at the birdie reverberates through my mind. I know the photo was heavily edited in the red room. “I’ll take the photo that has the coupon,” I say. It’s perfect.

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Joy DeSomber lives in South Carolina with her husband and Malinois X, now that her three children are grown. She writes fiction and creative nonfiction.

 

Debut Flash: 'Garage Sale' by Suvarup Saha

The morning I finally made up my mind and put my adjectives out for sale, the adverbs felt restless and so did the pronouns and articles of definitive. I obliged, and put them all outside, stacking them with care, remembering their birth-cries and their exploits, fondly, wishful that they would be of some use to someone else now.

I felt weightless in my bones, and observed a lift in my words as if the corridors of my thoughts were being fanned by the wingtips of migratory geese. Thoughts flowed, uninterrupted by the worry of an evocative metaphor or the glitz of a super-saturated imagery. Notes danced in and out of the measures, free of rhythm but full of their being. There was a plunder of happiness in this state of un-understanding, and I was gleefully choking on it.

Back at the kitchen counter past midday, as the winter sun started to lose its steam, I felt a little shiver in the skin of my sentences. To warm myself up, I ladled a bowlful of that lament stew that had been on simmer for a while now, but the tongue missed the salt and the pepper of an argument. A little panic started to spread through me like a wildfire. I strode quickly to the bedroom where on the memory foamed mattress the poems and promises lay bare, without the comforting cushions of the unreasonable and the warmth of my hand plucked duvet.

I darted for the door now to salvage what was left of the sale.

 

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Suvarup Saha is an engineer by profession and inquisitive by nature. He has been exploring creative writing in various forms: from travelogues, reviews, and creative non-fiction to short fiction and poetry. Suvarup reads (but not as much as he would like to), feasting on books that his partner curates and stacks in their overflowing bookshelves. He loves language; the smell of words and the ache they create when arranged just right. Suvarup also enjoys traveling to places where people speak in a different tongue. His responsibilities in this world keep shifting but currently includes fixing breakfast and doing math with his twelve-year-old son. Suvarup tries to listen and finds meaning both in noise and silence.

 

Debut Flash: 'The New Vicar' by John Keogh

The huge oak door closed behind him with a heavy thump, causing birds nesting in the eaves to flutter and flap. His footsteps echoed throughout the ancient church as he made his way to the pulpit, and looking out at the empty pews he wondered if they would still be empty when he delivered his first sermon the following Sunday.

Angus, the previous vicar, was old-school fire-and-brimstone; no matter how perfect a life you lived, you were always a sinner. He wondered what Angus would have thought of him; according to the Bible, there was no doubting his sins.

Taking this job seemed like an opportunity to start afresh – what was he thinking? If homophobia was rife on the mainland, it was hardly likely to be better in a close-knit society on a remote island where sheep outnumbered people.

Patrick had faced bigotry most of his life, but while a lot of his friends were happy to play the respectable role, he made no secret of who he was, and challenged abuse head-on when faced with it. Maybe that was why he came, to spread tolerance the way missionaries spread Christianity.

Wrapping his thick woollen coat around him to keep out the chill, he left the building and headed off across open fields toward the village to introduce himself to the locals. 

The land was cloaked in a soft mist, and the village, with its grey granite buildings, could barely be seen rising from the fog in the distance, adding to his sense of foreboding. When he reached the town he saw a splash of colour breaking the monochrome tableau, for there before him, straddling the width of the High Street hung a banner which read “Welcome to Craighly, Reverend Patrick” and above that, a row of rainbow flags.

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John Keogh began writing short stories and flash fiction when he retired at the start of 2023. A keen amateur photographer and musician, he likes to tap into his experiences to create stories which engage and surprise. He lives in Liverpool, England and is married with four adult children.

Debut Flash: 'The Visitor at Blackthorn Station' by Yolanda Lynn Sheppard

The train arrived at half past midnight, though no train was scheduled at that hour. The fog was so thick it seemed to breathe, curling around the iron rails like something alive. The lanterns along the platform flickered awake one by one, startled from their sleep. 

Clara had not meant to be there. She had wandered from the inn after a dream she could not shake — a voice calling her name, a promise whispered in the dark. 

The station was deserted, the ticket booth shuttered, the clock frozen at twelve. Yet the train waited, humming softly, as though it had been expecting her. The doors opened with a hiss. A rush of cold air spilled out, carrying the scent of roses and old stone. No passengers stepped off. No conductor called for boarding. Only silence — and then a voice. “You’re late.” 

Clara turned. A man stood in the doorway of the nearest carriage, tall and elegant, his coat sweeping the floor. His face was shadowed beneath a wide‑brimmed hat, but his eyes gleamed like polished obsidian. “I don’t know you,” she said. He smiled faintly. “No. But you knew me once.” The fog thickened, wrapping around her ankles like affectionate hands. The train’s lights pulsed, silver and soft, illuminating the name etched on the side of the carriage: The Blackthorn Line. Her breath caught. “That line was closed years ago.” “Not for me,” he said. “Not for us.” He extended a gloved hand. “Your family made a promise. A vow sealed in blood and moonlight. You carry their name — and their debt.” Clara stepped back, but the train seemed to move forward, its hum deepening to a heartbeat. “I don’t understand.” 

“You will,” he murmured. “When you remember.” He removed his hat. His face was pale, beautiful, and tragic — the kind of beauty that hurt to look at. His eyes were endless night, and his expression was not cruel but longing. “I waited,” he said softly. “Through fire, through ruin, through every century that forgot us. I waited for you.” 

Clara’s pulse stuttered. “For me?” 

“For the one who would return.” He reached into his coat and drew out a silver locket, tarnished and old. Inside was a miniature portrait — her face, painted in delicate strokes, wearing a dress she had never owned. “I painted this,” he said. “The night you left me.” 

The fog trembled. The lanterns dimmed. Clara felt the world tilt, memory flooding back in flashes — a ballroom lit by candlelight, a waltz that never ended, a kiss beneath the clock tower, and a promise whispered against her throat: I will find you again. Her knees weakened. “You died.” 

He nodded. “And so did you.” 

The train’s whistle cried — low, mournful, like grief given sound. The man stepped closer, his hand still outstretched. “Come,” he said. “The journey is short, but the destination is eternal.” 

Clara hesitated. The platform beneath her feet felt less solid, the fog rising higher, swallowing the world. She looked into his eyes — and saw not death, but devotion. A love that had refused to fade. She took his hand. The train doors closed behind her. The lanterns went out. And when morning came, Blackthorn Station was empty again — except for a single silver locket lying on the platform, its portrait newly painted. 

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Yolanda Lynn Sheppard is a writer from Maryland whose work explores memory, atmosphere, and the quiet tensions that shape everyday life. She is a single parent to a 14‑year‑old son

 

Debut Flash: 'Reiki' by Anna Sweet

My father is leaving out grapes for the foxes again. He tells ten-year-old me they’re good for them. It’ll take me until my first year of veterinary school to realise this isn’t true.

I recall my mother poking her head round the patio door to let us know she’s off to her Reiki class. 

“Ok, love, see you later.” He offers me the tub of grapes. “Load of bloody rubbish”, he scoffs under his breath. I grab a handful. 

Mum tries to explain Reiki when I ask her at bedtime. 

“The healing hands”, she says, stroking my hair, whispering in the glow of my lamplight. How the body can let go of bad memories. 

I’d often hear the foxes in the nighttime, screaming like crying babies or evil witches. Some nights I’d hear my father open his bedroom window and scream back at them, his voice joining in falsetto with their weird opera. That scared me more than their animal sounds.

I’d felt close to Dad that evening, working together, throwing handfuls of grapes to feed the local wildlife. The next day was Saturday. I always woke early to watch cartoons and eat Frosties straight out of the box, cherry-picking the most sugar-encrusted whilst staring in awe at superheroes on the TV. 

Box in hand, I remember how I looked out onto the frosted grass and saw a magical sight on the lawn. The sleeping fox. 

“Daaaaad!” I call excitedly. Slipper-clad, I pull the door ajar and pad over. 

Looking back, I know now, it has died from kidney failure. Overconsumption of tartaric acid. Dad appears by my side. 

“Must have had mange”, he explains. Ten-year-old me doesn’t know what that means. I lay my hands gently on the fox, burying my fingers into its rich, red fur. 

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Anna is a creative director living and writing in London. In her spare time, she is attempting to write a folk horror novel. She is also a member of the writing group, Sad Man Tapas, who meet every Tuesday to share their stories.

 

Debut Flash: 'Blank' by Izelle Du Pisanie

The four twigs and some hardened droppings are the most meagre of attempts at nest building Bri has seen from the notoriously careless city pigeons. It looks like the wind may have blown debris over her cherry-red car before a pale ovoid was simply dropped atop it. She continues to stare at it for the third minute straight. Readied car key in hand, hovering in the air where it was when she spotted the unexpected adornment, she wonders if the parents intend to return.  

She’s heard of the pigeons doing this before, nesting in random places, but she didn’t expect it to be so out in the open. So precariously balanced and bolstered by only the idea of a nest. On the roof of her car. Perhaps this wouldn’t have happened if she parked in her old spot and not the one Wayne used to park in. 

Bri is late for work. She understands that she must move the egg, but she cannot bring herself to touch it, lying there: smooth, white, and blank, like the doctor’s face last week after telling her to rest and regain her strength.

Debut Flash: 'Ablution' by Atiqah Ghazali-alKashif

She washes her hands first. Right, then left. The water runs thin and obedient over her skin, but the smell does not leave. It hides in the cuticles, something metallic, almost sweet. They said the river was clean. Clear as faith. Clear as intention. Someone laughed before the boy drank. She remembers that. Teeth, white. A dare passed like a blessing.

She rinses her mouth. The water trembles against her lips. She does not swallow. She thinks of how easily he did, head thrown back, throat open, as if the body were made only to receive. There had been a moment, brief and exact, where she could have spoken.

Don’t.

The word had risen, full and formed. It pressed against her teeth. It waited. She spits. She draws water into her nose, inhales until it burns. The sting feels deserved. Beneath it, something else, the memory of watching. Not shock. Not fear. Watching, as though the scene were already finished and she had arrived only to witness its ending.

His body folded later, quietly. As though returning something borrowed.

She washes her face. Forehead, cheeks, chin. She does not look at the mirror. They will call it accident. Contamination. The language of mercy. She washes her arms to the elbow. Right, then left. The sequence matters. Order restores what the day has broken. But she remembers the stillness inside her when he drank. The absence. Not ignorance, not confusion.

Permission.

She wipes her head. Once. Enough. By the time she reaches her feet, the water runs clear. She leaves it running anyway.

 

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Atiqah Ghazali-alKashif is a Malaysian writer and poet whose work has appeared in publications in Toronto, Cairo, and London. She performed at the Georgetown Literary Festival in 2019. Writing across cultures and languages, she explores memory, faith, and the quiet textures of everyday life.

 

Debut Flash: 'Springtime Blues' by Cameron

I remember him clothed in the blue of the winter sky and the sea below, in the small flowers of May and in the colour of my eyes. He is framed, now, in the white border of an instant camera photograph, leaning over the back of the orange intercity train seat, to see beyond the boundary of the image. His small smile restrains a surge of delight about his eyes as the train leaves the station.

That same thin blue was in the nurses’ dresses, in the curtains around his bed and in the blanket stretched over his feet. It was the colour of his duvet cover at home, on which two children, one dark, one fair, like he and me, floated upwards in a hot air balloon, into the wide blue sky, a repeating pattern of he’s and me’s. 

After he died, thousands of tiny blue forget-me-knots found their way into the light, through cracks in the pavement, around the base of brick walls and between the flowers that were meant-to-be. I recognised them for the first time, like so many things that had always been there, these tiny blue flowers the colour of his coat exhorting a promise of me.

Later, when I wanted to disremember, I removed his duvet cover from my bed, folded, wrapped and laid it at the bottom of a box at the back of a dim cupboard. I ripped the forget-me-knots from the fractures in the paving and buried them in darkness. And then I filled my mind with black and with white, with everything and nothing.

Blue is the colour of the winter’s sea and of our eyes, of uniforms and blankets and a chiding little flower. It is the colour of the train leaving the station.

---

Cameron wrote, initially, about the internal world and then, through the lens of a camera, felt the wonder of the natural world. She writes from the seclusion of her south facing room, under the influence of the literary canon, the morning light, and a little caffeine to spark the mind into life.

 

Debut Flash: 'Memory is all the home you get' by Romi H.

Fingers hover, heart stuttering over the final digit. The name on the screen is a ghost, yet deleting it feels like a second death. Your pupils flood with memories. You see the number and can’t look away. 

If you call, no one answers. Death has no cell service. Yet, the body is stubborn. It waits for a vibration, a “Hello,” or a sign that the silence isn't absolute. You want to tell them the trivial things: it rained today; you still break every egg yolk; you still laugh awkwardly. 

Dialing is like watering a dead plant. You don’t expect a bloom. You just refuse to forget the life it once held. It is an act of love and absurdity. You keep making space for them on the shelves of your heart, terrified that if you stop, they will truly vanish.

You wonder if they would do the same. If you were the one gone, would they search the corners of their life for you? There is ego in the question, but it keeps you alive: the hope that in that endless forever, there will be a corner with your name.

The screen goes dark and the face you imagined on the other side disappears. They will never see who you’ve become. 

But you remain there.

With your eyes full.

With your throat full.

And your hands empty.

 

---

Romi H. has been writing since she was 14 years old. She began with poetry before moving into poetic prose. At 23, she started a Substack, where she built a community of 20,000 subscribers. She is currently working on her first fantasy novel.

 

Debut Flash: 'Crusader' by Marinela Davies

Saturday night at the City’s edge; damp, dark, lonely, not yet eleven.

As I stepped into the Unicorn, my eyes stormed with winds and dreamt deeds, I met yours, inked in red calligraphy against the dim light, your fingers strumming strings for Double Trouble, the rumbling growl of power sneaking into my bones, paying no customs. When I turned my head, I missed you already.

For days you played the romantic lover, and I drank you in while your right thumb gently rubbed the short hairs at the base of my skull. I lost myself in your guitar beat, in your body drenched in muscles, in the salty sweat just beneath the heart, in your voice, always raspy with desire. 

The night you had friends over I found you mumbling plosives as the bass pulse thumped against the walls. Smoke curled and clung to kitchen cupboards, bottles of cheep wine bunched and bulged on the table, glamorous girls sparkled and sneered around your shoulder, their glossy, painted faces slipping out of focus. 

I ignored all advice and pinning a veil on my head I strode into a world inhabited by too many women who had done the same. And as we carried grocery bags and pushed trolleys in supermarkets and parking lots, we exchanged the knowing wink of rivals and allies. We all learned to spin a thousand small pirouettes, twists and feints in the campaign to tame the one we loved, to hold on just a little longer.

Today you’re just punching the keyboard, safety and routine having long conquered danger and adventure.

Today I am a warrior, my eyes full of dust rising in swarms, craving the battlefield. 

And when I kiss you goodbye, and turn my head to leave, I miss you no more. 

 

---

Marinela Davies is a teacher and translator. Her fiction grows of memory and the quiet details of everyday life.  Although she began writing later in life her imagination refuses to wait and she is making up for lost time.  You can find her at @marineladavies. 

 

Debut Flash: 'Things That Sing of Death' by E. Murray

The cicadas have spent seventeen years dreaming under the earth, and now their wings sing of the death racing towards them. Quick, they say. Hear me now. Today I am a jewel, a storm cloud, a sign of the times. Tomorrow my sisters and I will be piled together on the grass to rot in our decadence.

I am safe from their Greek chorus for now. Flinched from the live ones auditioning to be my own personal satellite, tried to avoid crunching the shell casings ambitiously advertising themselves as my newest brooch. Made it to the car unscathed. 

The sun is shining outside and I sing old Appalachian songs on the way to the doctor's office. They sure seem to know Death, those old mountain musicians. 

The drive home is quiet for a long time before I start singing again. Another year, I ask. I’m not ready for icy hands and traveling shoes. But I still sing songs of death. I sit in my cloak of feathers, a swan in her final days. Lamenting and mourning, accepting and rejoicing. What blackness awaits me, what sweet sleep I will have.

I think I will see my mother.

 

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E. Murray is an Italian-American poet and dog-lover. This is her first published work.